@sethabrutyn
Sociology, UBC. Theorist of Emotions, Suicide, Institutions, Evolution. Unrepentant DeadHead and Mets Fan. www.sethabrutyn.com Check out our new book on youth suicide: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/life-under-pressure-9780190847
New from me in Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour! Social theorists have trouble explaining how intersubjectivity is possible if norms are open-ended. I contrast two proposed solutions (offered by Talcott Parsons and Harold Garfinkel), both ultimately unsatisfying. #EMCA 1/4
Really interesting piece - check it out! Deals with some old but enduring sociological questions.
Better than disrupting the status quo, whatever that means
What is ASA? I think it seems like a silly question, and maybe even a breach. But the more I think, the more I wonder what ASA actually is
Social Capitalist Ethics III: The Disembedding of Sociality from Society
open.substack.com/pub/thesilve...
How are social media platforms like used car dealers? This post answers that question, and more. I first briefly review my first two posts in this series.
And whether kenobi is canon or not, his ability to almost pull obi’s starship down is impressive as shit.
#sociology job!
#sociology peeps: I am organizing a section at ASA called neuroscience, cognition, and sociology. Please submit. Please pass around. Papers need not do both neuroscience and cognition...
#sociology
one more day yall! I’ve got a session on neuroscience and/or cognitive science and sociology in the biology and sociology section. Looking for creative and risk taking papers. Empirical or theoretical.
#Sociology friends! Last call to submit your abstracts/papers for the 2026 ASA conference in NYC! I'm still accepting submissions for my session on Diverse Visions and Perspectives on the Sociology of Religion.
#sociology
Me an my uncle - the dead
Killing in the name of - rage
The trooper - Iron Maiden
Masters of war - Dylan
For whom the bell tolls - Metallica
Jeremy - Pearl Jam
#sociology
Friends! My fellow sociology major and I created a podcast at our university called “Connecting Sociology”.
We connect sociological concepts to everyday life. Check it out, share your thoughts, and recommend future topics.
youtu.be/uGnkmzA03_0?...
Biology and society.
#sociology peeps: I am organizing a section at ASA called neuroscience, cognition, and sociology. Please submit. Please pass around. Papers need not do both neuroscience and cognition...
Jack Daniels died from gangrene after kicking his safe in a fit of anger. Poor bastard.
Can we all agree that bourdieu‘s symbolic violence is one of the most poorly used concepts in sociology? I know we all agree.
#sociology #emotions affective sociology, motivation, and action
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
#sociology #emotions affective sociology, motivation, and action
journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
Just doing my duty and taking some for the tram. But you’re 100% right.
Filling in my annual report ahead of time...26 review assignments with 4 on the docket. That exhausts me just reading it.
It’s really just a Rorschach test
Oh, no doubt. But people living with their shitty ideas in silence was so much better than having to hear every single thing they say.
Throwback to the pre-social media era: the capacity to hold two antithetical opinions about a person and their work and not letting your strong urge to publicly proclaim your virtuosity at every chance possible.
This paper outlines a distributional approach to institutional analysis, reconceptualising institutions as distributions of knowledge and activity across people. We argue that institutionalisation and institutional change are best understood by focussing on actors with the requisite knowledge and motivation to keep institutional patterns going, fix them when they go awry, or transform them when required, here called functionaries. The distributional approach allows us to distinguish between two main types of institutional change often conflated in the literature: Content-based and formal change. Content-based change, the one most often discussed, involves the importation, recombination, or expansion of specific patterns of activity. In contrast, formal change, often neglected in the literature, refers to shifts in the distribution of knowledge and activity, leading to dynamics of centralisation and decentralisation of institutional patterns. In this way, the distributional approach highlights the role of functionaries in both institutional stability and change, providing a micro-level perspective on institutional dynamics.
New paper out with Marshall Taylor and @olizardo.bsky.social:
Functionaries: A Distributional Approach to Institutional Analysis
Instead of institutions as things that contain people, we suggest institutions as expertise distributed across people.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
Added bonus, this inspired me to open Parsons/Shils' toward a general theory of action to find something and POW, new ideas...
Another excellent piece from a sociologist I truly admire. As one of "those" in the Parsons camp, this essay spoke volumes to me. But, its value is in its attempt at transcending the (very) small contemporary pro-Parsons faction in the field. Erudite and insightful...check it out.
Gift link:
#momsky
About time people stopped dancing around the word.
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...